14 DAY TRIAL // On April 5, the Fukushima nuclear plant experienced a power outage which lasted for about three hours. The outage affected one of the plant's cooling systems, which reportedly went down at 2.27pm (5.27am GMT).
More precisely, information leaked to the public says that the power failure affected the plant's reactor number 3. Once the reactor was left without electricity, it stopped cooling the radioactive fuel rods in it.
Together with reactors number 1 and 2, this particular reactor was severely damaged in March 2011, when the plant was hit by both an earthquake and its subsequent tsunami.
This power outage was the second one to occur at said nuclear plant in less than a month. Thus, it was about two weeks ago when several of the plant's systems were left without electricity.
As reported, investigations carried out in the aftermath of this first power failure revealed that the outage was the result of one rat's getting inside one of the plant's switchboards and chewing on some cables.
Wishing to avoid any future such incidents, the nuclear plant's management team sent a team of workers to install nets meant to keep all animals at a fair distance from the plant.
While installing these nets, the workers accidentally cut the plant's cooling system for the No. 3 reactor from its power supply. Luckily, it only took about three hours before the cooling system was up and running once again, Daily Mail says.
As was to be expected, several people are now questioning Tepco's (Tokyo Electric Power Company) ability to keep things under control and keep any other disasters from happening.
Despite the plant's being hit by two power outages within a rather limited time-frame, Tepco maintains that the general public has nothing to worry about.
As they explain, both power failures were properly dealt with by their workers, and the plant's systems currently run no risks of going haywire.